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CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
285 
A remarkable fact is that, while these first or early works of writers who had no prior 
fame have become canonical, they are not the earliest examples of their genre. A 
claim to priority could be made by an anonymous work published in 1923, reprinted 
in 1924 and then almost completely forgotten
14
until a reprint in 2006: 
Από την 
Αιχμαλωσία. Κατά το Ημερολόγιο του Αιχμαλώτου Αεροπόρου Β. Κ.
(From Captivity: 
According to the Diary of the Captured Airman V. K.). The work, as its title 
suggests, purports to be based on the diary of a Greek airman captured by the Turks. 
G. Zevelakis in his introduction to the 2006 reprint convincingly argues that the 
author was Markos Avgeris (pen-name of Georgios Papadopoulos b. 1884- d. 1973), 
who was already a recognized literary figure. Why the book was forgotten for so 
long is not yet very clear. Zevelakis suggests that Avgeris, who later turned much 
more decisively to Marxism, disowned it and gives the narrator’s criticism of 
Bolshevik backing for Kemal as the reason; to this one could add the narrator’s overt 
Venizelism, his more general commitment to Greece’s Christian 
mission civilisatrice
in Asia Minor, and contempt for the Turks. The narrator also for the most part 
observes rather than undergoes suffering (as a prisoner of war he has relatively 
favourable treatment and in the period before the Greek defeat it could be 
characterised as chivalrous) which is only one theme in the book; he strongly 
emphasises political dissension on the Greek side and attributes the defeat to the 
14
With the exception of its discussion in Doulis 1977, 49-54. 

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CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
286 
royalist leadership. In these respects the book is very different from those that were 
later to become popular.